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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Adventures in Vegetarian Marshmallow Making

I didn’t publicize it too much, but I moved back to Colorado for awhile. Since I wont be in Spain to celebrate with my friends for Christmas I decided to send a box of homemade cookies and marshmallows to them. I had everything all set up and was about to open the packs of gelatin to get the marshmallows started when I thought…uh oh…is this gelatin made from Pork? Most of my friends in Spain don’t eat pork for various reasons so I would feel terrible sending them something that I knew had pork in it. Turns out Knox brand and all the store-brand gelatins are made from pork and beef.

Not a problem, I thought. How hard can it be to get pork-free gelatin? After all, Denver is a great foodie town. My dad and I hopped in my car and went on what turned out to be LONG tour of Denver’s different super markets. We went to 3 Arab super markets, Whole Foods, a Kroger brand super market, Vitamin cottage and a Korean super market. No luck. While we were out driving my dad found out that there is a kosher supermarket not that far from where we live. I went there the next day and was happy to find Leiber’s Unflavored Jel which is a vegan gelatin made from a product of a chemical reaction. I had done some research which said that this stuff substitutes for regular gelatin without problems, so I bought 2 boxes and headed back to the kitchen.

It did not work. At all. The marshmallows turned out like the texture of the inside of a Junior Mint and had a disgusting aftertaste. I was starting to get defeated, but I am never one to give up on something in the kitchen.

Marshmallow fail

Luckily, I have been keeping up with this season of Top Chef and remembered that one of the contestants made a shrimp noodle with agar agar. Agar agar is a vegan substitute for gelatin and is made from algae. While we were at the Korean supermarket I picked up 2 packets of powdered agar agar to play around with. Get your Agar Agar Here.

Once the Leiber’s marshmallows failed miserably I started looking for a recipe for agar agar marshmallows. Again, this turned out to be way harder than I thought. Don’t get me wrong, there are many bloggers with recipes for them. Only one of them has a recipe that works.
First, I will tell you all the ones that didn’t work.

Yes…I did try all of those. Side note to all of you recipe hunters: If you are going to try a recipe off a blog, make sure you read the comments. If the recipe doesn’t work, you’d better believe the readers will let the blog writer know.

At this point I was about ready to give up, but while on hold to sign up for health insurance I came across an interesting website that said vegan marshmallows usually don’t work because they need some sort of strong protein (ie. animal protein) to hold them together. This explains why none of the recipes listed above worked.

Deep in the pages of Google I came across the blog Be Miam and her recipe for Agar Agar Marshmallows. To make up for the lack of animal protein she uses egg whites. I was so happy to find out that based on the comments, her marshmallows actually worked! And they did!!!! These marshmallows turn out a little more dense and less squishy than normal marshmallows, but considering how many failures I had before I was unbelievably excited to finally have a recipe that works! Thanks Miam.